It would be nice if Drobos supported SMART data.
With multiple drives inside, it’s not immediately obvious how this could be done, especially if you wanted to use 3rd party programs to analyse the data.
Then I started wondering how many virtual drives a single USB device could emulate? If the number is high enough, then Drobo could create a tiny drive for each slot with a physical drive in it. The virtual drive would have to be R/O, I suspect, for safety’s sake. When a program requested SMART data from one of these virtual drives, Drobo would read the SMART data from the physical drive, and present it back to the program.